The Steel Barons

In 1991, thirty-year-old American lawyer Jack Parker arrives in Kyiv expecting to close a telecommunications deal and return to New York. One reckless night leaves him locked inside a Ukrainian venereal-disease clinic. Thirty days later, his marriage is collapsing, his career is gone, and America has very little left to offer him.

So Jack stays.

With the help of Sergei, a streetwise black marketeer who understands the new country considerably better than Jack does, he opens a law office and begins representing foreign businessmen entering newly independent Ukraine. Soon the deals become larger. Steel mills. Privatizations. Political connections. Men with guns. Government officials whose cooperation comes in envelopes.

Jack learns quickly. Perhaps too quickly.

The deeper he enters the emerging world of Ukrainian big business, the harder it becomes to distinguish legal work from political influence, professional success from complicity, and ambition from simple survival.

The Steel Barons is a semi-autobiographical novel grounded in Alex Frishberg’s firsthand experience as an American lawyer working in Ukraine during the chaotic 1990s. Documentary photographs from the period accompany a story in which many of the strangest events have one inconvenient quality: they could actually happen.